Throwing more money at it will not improve the situation. Obama is hardly correct. He either has or plans to kill school vouchers in Washington DC which allows parents to send their children to schools of their choice while pouring more money into the failed public system. He is indebted to the teacher's union and cares little about real education. I notice he didn't send his daughters to public school.

The National Education Association is one of the last true Marxist organizations in the world. You can lay 50% of blame for our failed public education system at the feet of teachers unions and 50% on the bureaucrats in school administration.

I am trying to capture the spirit of bipartisanship as practiced by the Democratic Party over the past eight years. Thus, I have chosen as my lead this proposition: Obama lied; the economy died. Obviously, I am borrowing this from the Democratic theme of 2003-08: "Bush lied, people died." There are, of course, two differences between the slogans.

Most importantly, I chose to separate the two clauses with a semicolon rather than a comma because the rule of grammar is that a semicolon (rather than a comma) should be used between closely related independent clauses not conjoined with a coordinating conjunction. In the age of Obama, there is little more important than maintaining the integrity of our language against the onslaught of Orwellian language abuse that is already a babbling brook and soon will be a cataract of verbal deception.

The other difference is that Bush didn't lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He merely was mistaken. Whereas Obama told a whopper when he claimed that he is not for bigger government. As he said last week: "As soon as I took office, I asked this Congress to send me a recovery plan by Presidents Day that would put people back to work and put money in their pockets, not because I believe in bigger government -- I don't."

This he asserted despite the fact that the budget he proposed the next day asks for federal spending as 28 percent of gross domestic product, higher by at least 6 percent than any time since World War II. Moreover, after 10 years, Obama's proposed spending as a percentage of GDP still would be 22.6 percent, nearly 2 percentage points higher than any year during the Bush administration despite the full costs of Sept. 11, the Iraq and Afghan wars and the rebuilding of New Orleans after Katrina.

Consider also this assertion in his not-quite-State of the Union address: "My administration has also begun to go line by line through the federal budget in order to eliminate wasteful and ineffective programs. As you can imagine, this is a process that will take some time. But we're starting with the biggest lines. We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade."

But lamentably, a few days later, The Washington Post reported: "A senior administration official acknowledged yesterday that the budget does not contain $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. Instead, the figure represents Obama's total efforts at deficit reduction, including tax hikes (of more than $1 trillion) on families making over $250,000 a year. It also includes hundreds of billions of dollars 'saved' by not continuing to spend $170 billion a year in Iraq."

Only a big-government man would think of calling a trillion-dollar tax increase a spending cut or "saving." Technically, of course, it is true. A trillion-dollar tax increase would reduce spending by $1 trillion for those private citizens who were taxed. And from the perspective of the federal government, a trillion dollars taxed is a trillion dollars saved from the greed of the taxpayers who produced the wealth and might well want to spend or invest it in nongovernmental activities.

But the foregoing merely are pettifogging numbers compared with Obama's bigger ideas about energy and health care (regarding health care, more in future columns). Our president shares a fascinating idea about energy with most of what used to be known as the "small is beautiful" crowd. It is a curious phenomenon that one needs a very big government to enforce the beauty of small.

Obama's secretary of energy, Steven Chu, said last year that the price of electricity in America is "anomalously low." You see how much smarter that Nobel Prize winner is than you? You probably thought you already were spending enough on electricity and fuel.

And sure enough, Obama explained last week that in order to make alternative energy sources -- wind, solar, perhaps eventually human muscle power -- economically competitive, he intends to raise the price of carbon-based energy until it is so expensive that even solar power would be such a deal.

This level of destructive irrationality cannot be accomplished in the private sector. It would take a very big government indeed to bring such inanities into being. (Disclosure: Being rational, I give professional advice to carbon-based energy producers.)

If President Obama were to try to misrepresent his positions for the next four years, there would be nothing he could say that would approach the inaccuracy of his claim last week that he is not for big government. It is the essence of the man and his presidency. He doesn't like America the way it has been since its founding, and it would take an abusively big government to realize his dreams of converting America into something quite different. If you don't know that, you don't yet know Obama."

He's not running the show. The Clintons are back in charge and obama is the man out in front to take all the heat. He is just a young dumbass that don't realize he was put in that position by the Clinton regime. The Libs were told this and now they are wanting out. To late. They are not going to get a free ride. Money's all gone.
The american tax dollares are going to AIG to bail out the people around the world. I don't see Obama asking any other country to cough up some stimulas for AIG. Nope just the american tax payer for foriegn bail out.

One of my daughters is a teacher in an urban school. I love hearing the stories. They are not allowed any discipline. The disruptive children run the schools. It is popular to use drugs in place of discipline. I have read that half of all minority children drop out before the graduate from high school. We already spend more per pupil than any other country. We fill the kids heads with politically correct garbage but they don't know the basics. Not surprising that the worst kids have parents that don't care or make excuses for their kids. If the parents (or usually parent) don't care the kids don't care. It is the same liberalism that has poisoned all our culture that has ruined our schools. Destroyed familes with no father, unions, no discipline, no morality and government control. The only thing that could save our children would be total school choice. Give parents the option to take their money and their children and leave. That would include religious schools that would teach the same values parents want their children to be taught. It will never happen. Liberals are all about control and shared misery.

Speaking from DIRECT experience in education.........you old farts know little of what you speak. The fact is that our kids today have many more learning opportunities than ever before. The fact is that countries like China are sending people to the U.S. to see how we teach our kids to be creative. Japan had one of my physics teachers come to their country last summer to speak to the Japanese scientists on how to instruct high school level students on nuclear physics. The U.S. leads the world in innovation. Why is that? It is because we are encouraging critical thinking in education today. It is because we are not teaching ONLY the basics.
At my high school a student can graduate with nearly two years of college completed due to concurrent credit courses offered at our school. These credits can be purchased through a local University for a mere $65 a credit. A smokin deal! Students meet the same expectations of the University course.

Over the years it has been my observation that the school is generally a pretty good indicator of the community. Expectations for education mirror the community.
Is the education system broken? Hardly. At least not in my community. We spend a mere $2,700 per pupil in my district which is much much less than most places and we produce a high quality student product. I will agree it is not ALL about the money when it comes to education.

Next time you are in Idaho and would like to visit a school that IS a bargain for the taxpayer dollar let me know. I would be happy to give you a tour.

Lyle

Now, get off the educators and get the bashing back where it belongs, on the media and the "chosen one"

When my daughter first began teaching in an urban school she asked what would become of these kids when they are not taught any self discipline by the schools and their own parents don't care. She was told quite bluntly that they would never finish high school. They are written off in elementary school. It is true that students come from around the world to attend our universities. It is also true that many of our professionals in several fields are full of these students from around the world. In some fields half of the professionals were foreigners from around the world. Why? Because our own students from our public school system failed to make the grade. Many think without the influx from students from around the world our own industry would be in big trouble. As I said above, many are already dropping out before high school. Our urban areas are full of dropouts. It is true that with our freedom we did create much of the worlds advancements. I just read yesterday that many of those foreign students are now going home after graduation. Better opportunites back home. With Obama and the Democrats ready to punish achievement and reward laziness I predict far fewer new advances from this country. Same with the government taking over health care and going after pharmaceutical companies. If you punish achievement you get less of it. If you subsidize failure you get more of it.